I don't want to overpraise Paddington 2 just because it is not as cynical, meretricious and condescending as the American animation of Pixar and Disney, but it is, at the very least, a personal film of the British director, Paul King, and not the corporate product of multiple directors, as is often the case with American animation. Of course Paddington 2 is mostly live-action, lacking the claustrophobia of full animation and integrating the animated title bear without the show-off effects of most computer animation today. I liked the gentle humor of the movie -- rather like the output of the British studio Ealing in the fifties -- with its excellent timing and deadpan dialogue, as in one scene where the villain finds neighbors searching his house in their pajamas.
Ironically, Paddington the bear comes across as more human than the actual humans in the movie. And there is too much campiness and overacting in some of the portrayals, especially Hugh Grant as the villain and Brendan Gleason as the prison cook, even if the effect is to make Paddington seem even more human, as someone "who will look for the good in everyone and find it." Of course the best humor is always the most serious and Paddington 2 portrays, in a low-key manner, an England that probably has mostly ceased to exist, an England of steam trains and pop-up books, where communities stick together, where refugees (Paddington is from Peru) are accepted and embraced and "a nice cup of tea" can overcome one's troubles.
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